MMO's designers burden themselves with designing 2 games - the leveling game and the endgame. If they fail at either one then their game will not stand the test of time. If they want to succeed, then they need to focus on just the endgame and eliminate the leveling game. If they can keep people engaged in the endgame, then they don't need the leveling game. If they can't, they lost anyways. By eliminating the leveling game they can refocus their devs, artists and level designers on creating a great endgame instead of splitting their attention.

I wrote a blog entry about it in 2009:

http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/mrjimorg

Originally posted by Czzarre

Also, I would add that you should have a large collection of models/sprites available with the purchase. Players again can dream up a cool castle, but they cant put pixel to paper.

^^ This is a serious issue for many indies like myself who have a 3d engine (torque) and the skills to make it into something but loose a lot of our inspiration when we only have a handfull of inconsistantly themed models to work with.

All I have to say is

Coldain Ring Quest

Originally posted by JB47394

 

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Originally posted by JGMIII
Sadly that natural playstyle/experience doesn't last forever in any mmo. Once you get to a high level you hit a zone, explore everything in said zone, complete every quest and still find yourself needing more levels before you could naturally progress into another zone. This is when the game goes sour for me.

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Well said, and I agree with you. Levels are in the way. Many times I've wondered what a fantasy MMO would be like without levels. Just go wandering the world doing whatever quests come to hand in whatever area of the world that you're in.

The fun of doing different areas would be that they were actually different. Not in the artwork and the drops, but in the behavior of the monsters and the tasks that the NPCs asked the player characters to complete. Somebody mentioned altering the player experience without advancement. That's a reasonable next step. It would be a way to keep the game interesting without having to labor through levels before doing anything new.

It would be a rather different game. It would probably begin to involve more player skill.

I agree wholeheartedly. That's why I created a blog post about how levels ruin MMOs.

www.mmorpg.com/blogs/mrjimorg/032009/3524_Save-the-Dragons-The-case-for-an-MMO-without-levels

I'm creating this thread to share with you some of the funnest moments I've had in MMO's and to ask you yours.

1. EQ- The Coldain Ring quest. Amazing difficult and time consuming, but spawning an outright war which your guild must help with to win was really awesome.

2. EQ- Epic Quest raids- especially the last encounter for druids.

3. EQ- Grinding in Blackburrow, Karnor's Castle, PoI, and watching for TRAIN!

4. EQ- Charm fighting. Really really tough, risky, rewarding, and interesting.

5. EQ- LDoNs - each mission bringing me closer to that item that I really want, and requiring a well played group for about 2 hours.

6. EQ- Shakey scarecrow quest. Apparently this quest was for higher level chars. While playing it at a really low level I explored much of the world, found out how immense it was, snuck around soo many creatures that could kills me almost instantly, and availed the help of a few strangers.

7. EQ- Any number of zones that once you entered required you to fight your way to the exit (no escaping).

8. WoW (beta)- after finding a recipie for a mechanical squirel I decided to become an engineer so I could create this. I leveled my way through it and made one. Then I ran around with 'Stabby' thinking I was soo cool for having such a rare item. (ah ... to be newbish and nieve again)

9. Wow- learning and playing the AH to make 10k gold on a level 30. I don't think it's the game Blizzard expected for it's players, but was fun none-the-less.

Things that are missing from MMORPGS today:

1. Challenge - In EQ fighting a creature that was your level ment that you were likely to loose (unless you were twinked). In Wow and most other games today you can fight creatures several levels higher than  yourself without fear. Worst case you might have to drink a potion or run away. Even if you die its no biggie- you just run back (now at super-speed) and continue like nothing happened.

2. Quests suck - hard!  Hey devs, let me tell ya something - I don't read the quest text. I don't give a damn about every NPC in the game having some grudge against someone else. None of it matters. I don't care. You're not the next Steven King, or Ann Rice. These stories are just an excuse to give me a pethetic errand.    Here's the true story behind Wow: You are a character (race doesn't really matter) who goes around doing meaningless tasks that don't make a difference in order to get stuff that will make it easier to complete more meaningless tasks.   The true story should be more interesting than this.

            Here's some clues to a better system- if your going to have opposing factions locked in an endless struggle to defeat oneanother, they shouldn't be living together in the same cities doing the same quests! (That means you wow). In EQ the warring factions each had their own cities and quests to kill people from the other's cities. My guild was on Coldain faction and we did raids against the giants. People on giant faction wouldn't be able to get or turn in their quests because the quest-givers were dead :) Of course, in EQ turning in a quest was a big deal because it would take you hours or even days to complete one. In Wow, you have quests to deliver mugs of ale - what am I a waitress? One quest in particular required a ton of effort to complete and would cause a war to begin. You needed a good guild to fight the war and if your side won you got an amazing reward; if you failed you lost a great deal. Also, anyone on the server could come and join in on the war as well.

3. Remember, its an MMO, not MSO. If you end up playing the game alone (or with just one other person) then your not really playing an MMO. By requiring players to group to get things done you've added a player interaction element to the game that is vital. If you don't have this then the player is really playing a Massive Single Player game.

I played EQ2 at the start and left it, came back a couple of times to retry in and left every time. Why? What it boils down to is simply the fact that my wife and I weren't having fun.  All the features, etc don't matter - what matters is the fun level. Here are the reasons EQ2 isn't fun:

1. Too many stupid innane quests - "Take this broom to my friend 2 zones away". Boring!

2. The "What the heck is this thing in my inventory?" issue. Wow has made it pretty easy to figure that out. EQ2 has all kinds of objects like "This might be useful to a guild of scouts" things which you can give to a particular person for faction.

3. "Where do I go next?" After having played Wow with the QuestHelper add-on, I don't think I could play any MMO that doesn't help you identify where to go (without a lot of reading)

4. Travel times are BORING!

5. Combat is very repetative. All fights seem to be the same. Despite different graphics, all the creatures are the same. The spells aren't interesting and don't require any tactical manuvering. My level 49 mage in wow has 15 spells ready to be cast at a moment's notice, and every single one of them is very important for at least one situation, and would cost me my life if I didn't have it. Also, as a wow mage, I can AOE fight. Even EQ1 had tactics (fear kiting, bard song twisting, charm fighting, root & rot, etc), although most of these were created despite the developers not because of them.

6. Long-term and Overall objectives are missing. The only long term objective I saw in EQ2 was gaining levels. At least EQ1 had faction grinding, LDON token collecting, or collecting tradeskill items (that was a major grind!). Other objectives that could be added are working with all the people on your server to unlock new content (new zones or bosses for instance).

7. Selling items is annoying. It could be worse (EQ1), but could have been better.

8. Lack of community feeling. Sure, there are a lot of great people on the server, but the only place you'll meet them is in groups. If your level 25ish right now there isn't anyone around to play with. I agree with the person who said that they need an Ironforge-like area where all players congregated. In EQ1 they had PoK.

For those of you who haven't played, here is my attempt at describing Warhammer Online compared to WOW. Keep in mind I've only played WO for 2 days and only got to level 10.

The biggest change I've noticed is the lack of running quests in WO. In WoW, you spend way too much time running from point A to B - really boring. WO is almost constant action.

Public Quests (PQs) are fun if there are enough players around to complete the quest. They're nice because you don't have to seek out and find a group, nor do you have to worry about people ganking the mobs with the best drops. You just jump in and kill, kill, set the explosive, and kill! When it's all over you're given an award and then either do it again (after 2 min quest reset) or move on. Lots of fun. The best part is that, unlike wow instances, there no searching for group or commitment to stay with a group. You come when you want and leave whenever you want.

Looting in WO is kind of annoying. First, there is no autoloot option like WOW (maybe added later?). Secondly, since there is almost constant action, there never seems to be a good time to loot. Also, the tradeskills allow you to havest corpses. At first I thought I would like it, but I ended up abandoning these skills because I didn't want to waste the time when I could be killing.

The classes in WO are interesting. The ones that I thought I would like I ended up not liking at all (shaman, rune priest, witch hunter) , and the ones that I was ho-hum about I ended up liking. My favorite turned out to be the Ironbreaker (dwarf tank). When attacked, they build up grudge- kindof like a warrior in wow. However, very few skill use up that grudge. Instead, many of the skills just perform better when you have grudge. I noticed that although there is an auto-attack feature, it's pretty much useless since you have such a large action-point pool and it usually generates APs as fast as you use them. So, every 2 seconds (the global cooldown) you use another special attack. It's just a matter of choosing which one.

There's a lot more to say, but this post it long enough. So, to sum up, both my wife and I will be getting this game, but we hope they fix the pathing and add an auto-follow feature.

The creators of these games see big dollar signs, but what they don't see is that new expansions pose a barrier to old players returning. I have an everquest account and have considered going back to it, but I don't want to have to find and purchase all of the expansions that I've missed. Meanwhile, I can't convince my wife to take up EQ 1 because she feels that the graphics are just too outdated for her. If Sony want to release a new expansion, they should make it include all previous expansions and they should create an expansion that updates the graphics and quests of the old-world zones.